Editors' Review

PortableApps offers fully functional, fully portable versions of popular open source software. Its Sumatra PDF Portable is a lightweight version of the PDF file viewer. It's small enough to fit on just about any mobile device or storage medium, giving you the option of viewing PDF files on the go. As a portable application, it will run on any compatible Windows machine without installation and without leaving behind any personal information or changes to the registry.

The Sumatra PDF Portable "installer" copies the program's executable to a destination of your choice; the default destination is a new folder on your C drive, but we opted for a new folder on the desktop for convenience. You can move the program later and it'll run fine, as we demonstrated by copying it to a USB drive we use as a portable toolkit. Sumatra PDF Portable has the typical interface of a bare-bones PDF viewer, with a toolbar containing a page display and controls, zoom icons, and a search field. We browsed to a folder full of old product manuals and other PDFs we use for testing and clicked on a 61-page camera manual. Sumatra PDF Portable displayed the document with perfect clarity, even embedded photographs, with the document's table of contents displayed in a left-hand panel. The clarity and legibility was maintained throughout the zoom range, and while the highest zoom settings took a brief moment to render, they were just as clear as the document's content allowed. The Book View and Continuous View options let you display documents in a print-like format or see them all at once for rapid scanning. The HTML-based Help file is included in the download, so all you need to view it is a browser; you don't need an active Internet connection.

We just love portable applications, and we love those from PortableApps especially. Sumatra PDF Portable is yet another highly recommended, totally portable, and completely free program from its extensive list of portable freeware.

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Publisher's Description

Sumatra PDF Portable is the lightweight Sumatra PDF packaged as a portable app, so you can view PDF files on the go. You can place it on your USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, or a CD and use it on any computer, without leaving any personal information behind.

It's really a pain in the a** when you merely need to read a PDF file but the program responds incredibly slow. Conversely that won't happen if you use this program, it has a simple feature, fast and does as described. This is exactly what I've been looking for! Thanks!

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